There is no smile that had to appear in front of the camera for more than 15 minutes in the same pose
Beloved in the Victorian era
A few photos
These Victorian portraits reveal what photography was like a century ago.
Victorian life must have been a lot of fun. If you weren't dead or about to die from infectious disease, you always tried to act, or at least look that way.
In those early days of photography, the exposure time required for an image to appear in the camera was long. The shortest method (the daguerreotype method) lasted 15 minutes. This was actually a huge improvement over the time it took to shoot the first photograph in 1826, which took eight hours to produce.
Common knowledge has always pointed to these long exposure times as the reason why Victorians rarely smile in photographs. While that was certainly a contributing factor, the real reason these early Victorian portraits look so sad is because people didn't smile that much in life.
The oft-quoted wisdom is, "Nature gave us lips to hide our teeth." Flashing a big toothy grin seemed classless. The only people who can do that are drunks or stage actors. However, smiling in Victorian portraits made people look like modern clowns.
And, for some, sealed lips were a very conscious attempt to hide one's teeth—orthodontia had not yet been invented and dentistry was not in common practice.
Thus, in the early days of studio portraiture, the desire to create non-smiling portraits actually gave us the forerunner of portraits: instead of wide-mouthed smiles, studio photographers were encouraged to pose in the same pose.
Moreover, the idea with long exposure Victorian photographs was not to capture the moment, but the essence of the person in a way that portrayed who they were for their entire life.
As Mark Twain said, "There is nothing more dangerous than a stupid smile fixed forever."
Curious about these Victorian portraits?
Among the images
Queen Victoria with Princesses Victoria, Elizabeth, Irene and Princesses Alix of Hesse, AD 1879. Flickr / "Victorian Photographic Portraits of People"
An elderly couple identified as Daniel Chaffee and Catherine Newell. Chaffee was born on June 3, 1783 and died in 1859. Newell was born on November 24, 1805 and died less than a month after her husband. Flickr / "Victorian Photographic Portraits of People"
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